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3. Hull - Grudge
Chapter 3Grudge“When I saw the smoke, I had to come back,” Harker said. “It wasn’t even a question.” She sourly eyed the pack of summoned demons trailing me as we trotted down the street looking for any straggling undead or enemy demons. “But if you think I’m going to let you kill me because I broke your exile, you’ve got another thing coming. We’re all likely to be dead as soon as the Orcs decide to join in the sacking anyway, and if I’ve got to go, it’s gonna be while I...
2. Basil - A Dark Path
Chapter 2A Dark PathMy steps were leaden and my face drawn as I followed the lich through the once bright home of the Sun King. The halls and gathering places of the grand building had been transformed into a grim reflection of my current state: a place utterly gutted of its previous purpose. A single, heinous Spell had made it this way, one cast by the lich herself before the mixed group of demons and undead entered the Palace proper.Bodies littered our path, keeled over steps or collapsed in t...
1. Hull - The Fight for the Lows
Chapter 1The Fight for the Lows“You stay here and double yourself like there’s a fire under your ass,” I told Yveda. “Whatever comes your way, you stop it, understood? I don’t care if it’s that lich lady riding one of the Twins like a horse. Nothing gets past you.”The demon pursed its lips. “This whole place is a stiff breeze away from falling down on its own. We should find a more defensible location.”I clenched my fists, hearing the screams and shouts from up ahead. “This i...
B3: 0. Xemris - Breaking Down
NOTE: Aaaaaand we're back! Thank you all who stuck with me through this lengthy hiatus -- you're the real deal, all of you. I can't tell you how much I appreciate your patience and support. Now we've got a straight shot through book 3. Welcome back! Tell your friends!!PrologueBreaking Down“What are you doing?” Xemris demanded, catching Yveda the Fluid’s wrist before she poured the mixture into the crucible.The elder demon gave her a toothy, unfriendly smile. “These reagen...
B1 Edits: 10. Basil - Today's the Day
Chapter 10 read-alongChapter 10Today’s the DayBasil, Duelist-ScholarLiving SoulUncommonPerfect card memoryBy the time I joined my family for an early breakfast I had slept perhaps an hour in total, a few snatches here and there when my eyes could no longer focus on the crabbed script of the Fire card textbook, and none of it by choice.As usual, my parents and brothers were preoccupied with their own affairs and so paid little attention to me despite my obvious rumpled appearance and the fact t...
B1 Edits: 9. Hull - Rock and a Card Place
Chapter 9 read-alongChapter 9Rock and a Card PlaceHull, Street UrchinLiving SoulUnknown RarityUnknown AbilitiesMy running feet took me back toward the Merchant District, where I could see a smear of greasy smoke rising over the rooftops. Not there. They’ll have the fire brigade and the city watch crawling all over. I darted left on Pasero, a narrow lane hardly wider than a back alley, and toppled three crates of gorsefruit stacked outside the grocer’s on the corner. It cost me a couple of se...
B1 Edits: 8. Hull - Jokes Should Be Funny
Chapter 8 read-alongChapter 8Jokes Should Be FunnyHull, Street UrchinLiving SoulUnknown RarityUnknown AbilitiesMy feet started sizzling the second I crossed the threshold. I bit down on my tongue and threw myself forward. I knew right where the card was supposed to be. Every step forward felt like holes being burned straight up through to my foot bones, and it was getting harder and harder to hold my breath. My singed face felt like it was about to catch fire. This is stupid this is stupid this ...
B1 Edits: 7. Hull - A Bad Idea
Chapter 7 read-alongChapter 7A Bad IdeaHull, Street UrchinLiving SoulUnknown RarityUnknown AbilitiesLife on the streets had not made me good at complex planning. My usual way of solving a problem was to hit it and empty its pockets, but that wouldn’t work here. Barging back into the tailor’s card shop would just get me beaten and thrown in jail. I’d heard bad stories about street boys going into the cells under the palace and never coming back, and even before that, the big doorman could b...
B1 Edits: 6. Basil - Cards by Candlelight
Chapter 6 read-alongChapter 6Cards by CandlelightBasil, Duelist-ScholarLiving SoulUncommonPerfect card memoryAfter collecting my wayward Headsman – who had ended up in the pantry of all places – I spent the rest of the evening poring over the Water cards my family owned, agonizing over whether I should reconfigure my deck. The grimoire was part of my mother’s dowry, but she rarely dueled anymore, focusing instead on using her soul ability to help the local crop yields. Her fighting cards h...
B1 Edits: 5. Hull - Precious
Chapter 5 read-alongChapter 5PreciousHull, Street UrchinLiving SoulUnknown RarityUnknown AbilitiesSkop kept a tight hand on my elbow all the way to Hook Street. His grip was hard and he wasn’t shy about using it. My fingers were tingling, but any time I tried to jerk away, he pinched even tighter and yanked me back like a rich man’s pet wyvern on a leash. He kept up a steady mutter of threats and directions in my ear that all blended together into a single, wordless promise of violence the l...
B1 Edits: 4. Basil - Reacquaintance
Chapter 4 read-alongChapter 4ReacquaintanceBasil, Duelist-ScholarLiving SoulUncommonPerfect card memoryI sprinted so quickly anyone could have been forgiven for thinking I’d challenged Randel to a race, never mind the fact that he was strolling on at a snail’s pace, oblivious to me as he sank yet another day into his grand dreams of being an artist. I put him out of my mind entirely. I wished to reach Esmi with all possible haste, and I didn’t have a clue in which drawing room or courtyard...
B1 Edits: 3. Basil - Fighting the Future
Chapter 3 read-alongChapter 3Fighting the FutureBasil, Duelist-ScholarLiving SoulUncommonPerfect card memory“If you can’t beat me, you have no hope in the Rising Stars Tournament, Basil. It’s a fact, boy, simple as sunshine.”It wasn’t that I really expected Tipfin to say anything new on our final day of practice duels, but as always, the words reached right into the secret heart of my fear and poked me. Perhaps encouragement cost more than I was able to pay him.“I don’t even have a...
B1 Edits: 2. Hull - Big Man
Chapter 2 read-alongChapter 2Big ManHull, Street UrchinLiving SoulUnknown RarityUnknown AbilitiesIt wasn’t until I was sprinting toward them that I caught a good glimpse of their faces, and on any other day what I saw would have stopped me in my tracks. The fat fellow on the right was Skop, and the taller, stronger one was actually a massive freak of a woman named Harker. They were two of the Big Man’s meanest enforcers, and I spent a good chunk of my life avoiding them and the others like t...
B1 Edits: 1. Hull - A Lost Soul
Note: Okay, friends, I'm dropping some of my edited chapters from book 1! I hope you enjoy this new, polished version.You'll notice immediately that my beautiful, beautiful card images are gone. I hate this as much as you do. The unfortunate truth -- and anybody who has picked up the physical version of Demon Card Enforcerknows it already -- is that Amazon doesn't play nice with lots of images in their books. So here's what I've done: There are textblocks where the cards used...
Update - Feb 19, 2025
Hello, my fellow card junkies! I wanted to check in with everyone and let you know where things stand. I've been hard at work editing book 1, and I'm blown away by both the amount and quality of constructive feedback I've received from comments on here, on Royal Road, and from our Discord community. I've been taking it all to heart and am making the edited version of the book the best it can possibly be. That process is a heavier lift than I expected, is the thing, and that fact ...
Announcement, Dec 7
Hey friends and card fiends,Here we are at the end of book 2. Thanks for sticking with me all this time! I wanted to throw out a couple of announcements in the wake of the book's ending. I went straight from book 1 into book 2, and boy, do my bones feel it. I started posting Source & Soul 13 months ago, and I haven't missed a Tuesday or Saturday since, if I recall correctly. I love this story so much, and I'm all-in on book 3... but I need a bit of a break before I hop on it. The ser...
60. Kobold Whisperer - Remember
Chapter 60RememberThe young woman blinked, scanning the room around herself with a furrowed brow. She stood in an entry hall of what might have been a well-to-do merchant home, but the style was one she’d never seen before. The floor was tiled in some kind of earthy stone with white veining and the walls were mudded with a terracotta plaster that managed to look both elegant and rustic. A chandelier of branching animal horns and wrought iron with no less than thirty fresh candles cast a pleasi...
59. Basil - Closing Doors
Chapter 59Closing DoorsIt didn’t take long for me to discover that the lich’s deck was designed to slowly grind me into submission, but somehow, I was five turns in and still standing. This was despite the fact that she had used a Mythic Relic to get a Legendary Soul onto the field on her third turn with a targeted Water Source Explosion.Ever since his arrival, my Master Shieldbearer had been forced to fend off an increasing number of Zombies, who, when they were destroyed and cycled with De...
58. Hull - Who You Really Are
Chapter 58Who You Really AreI stared at the charred husk of my father where it lay, pathetic and powerless in the crater made when the Orc general had laid my brother Gerad low. They were both there now, a stone’s throw away from the corpse. Gerad had the same stunned, hopeless look on his face that I felt in the pit of my stomach. I wondered if he was thinking the same thing as me: I wasn’t the one who got to kill him after all.My very soul throbbed and burned at the thought, but it was a c...
57. Basil - Impossible Odds
Chapter 57Impossible OddsThe massive, Twins-made coliseum disintegrated as our King fell, the chairs and low walls turning back into lines of light and then to nothing at all. My seat had been in the upper reaches of the arena, but instead of plummeting to my death, I was carried gently downward by the reality-bending magics Fate and Fortune possessed. It was a phenomenon I barely noticed, in truth, as my attention remained rooted on the king. I desperately wanted to believe he still lived, that...
56. Hull - Apotheosis
Chapter 56ApotheosisDear old Dad hung there in the sky looking like some god of judgment. Gone was the feckless, self-centered royal I’d seen him pretend to be in front of his nobles and subjects; in this moment Hestorus was a being of might, a central pillar of reality with more presence and vividness than the rarest of card summons. If a sculptor could have caught that face and wrought it in stone, they’d have hung up their hammer and chisels for good, knowing they could never again reach ...
55. Basil - Upstream
Chapter 55UpstreamI ran through the streets of Treledyne, feeling as if it was a place foreign to me. A smoky haze permeated the air, aggravating my eyes and making my chest burn the longer I spent in it, the sun above an angry orange when viewed through this unnatural filter. Ash stained the edifices of the normally whitewashed buildings, smears of soot like bruises. Worst though were the bodies that littered the cobblestones, often propped against buildings, as if people preferred to be uprigh...
54. Hull - The Thick of It
Chapter 54The Thick of ItI surged through the chaos in a haze that was somehow both focused and almost free of thought. I was sweating freely inside my armor, the Talisman of Spite blazed on my chest, fully charged, I clutched the Vampiric Blade in my left hand, and the Hateful Hammer was held in a reverse grip in my right, giving me the option of choosing its fated Overkill or the more freeform damage from the clawed brass knuckles on the same hand. My punches were getting harder every day now;...
53. Basil - Foolish or Wise
Chapter 53Foolish or WiseThe place Azure took me to looked like a regular counting house with a painted sign of stacked coins hanging out front. However, once within and a floor down, I discovered that the belly of the structure was considerably more expansive than I would have guessed. There were multiple stone-lined corridors fitted with metal doors, and Azure explained that another floor down there was a tunnel that led all the way out of Treledyne, running beneath the southern wall. I had wo...
Order Card Library
Souls (31)1 Source:2 Source:3 Source:4 Source:5 Source:6 Source:7 Source:Spells (19)1 Source:2 Source:3 Source:4 Source:6 Source:8 Source:Relics (12)2 Source:Korikana token → 3 Source:Smithy token → 4 Source:5 Source:Multi-Source (7)Card Upgrades→ →
52. Hull - Defender on the Wall
Chapter 52Defender on the Wall“I won’t do it,” the demon said.“You will,” I told him, keeping my voice level.“You can’t make me,” the other one sniffed, folding his arms and turning away. “I can hold back my duplication if I wish.”“You’re a card now,” I reminded him, my hands tightening on the stone crenellations of the wall in front of me. “You’re my card.”I looked back and forth between his two current bodies. “I can make you do it, and am in fact doing so rig...
51. Basil - Retreat
Chapter 51RetreatWalking the streets of Treledyne again I had thought would give me immeasurable relief, but it turned out that a wall, no matter how high, couldn’t protect me from my thoughts. Over and over I played the image of Qi’shen being swarmed by that foul demon. I had been in the air at the time, too far away to do anything but watch, and yet I still felt a measure of responsibility for his death. Wenden I hadn’t even seen perish, nor had any of us gone back for his body, such a j...
50. Hull - Brothers
Chapter 50BrothersWe were in deep shit, and I knew it. I ignored the fact and swung my Vampiric Blade through another one of the damned, grinning demons. A single extra point of Nether damage was enough to kill it, but it didn’t sparkle into nothing like Souls did; instead, purple sludge mucked up our treetop platforms, making the fighting that much harder. Another one climbed on my back and raked its claws against my Iron Maiden Plate. It held up, not letting any damage through, but I had to ...
49. Basil - Brothers
Chapter 49BrothersRiding on the back of Gale’s Mythic Griffin as it shot through the sky was like nothing I had experienced before. Even sitting behind my brother, the wind tore at my face and clothing, like it wished to fling me from the saddle. The constant buffeting was gut-wrenchingly terrifying but also invigorating, my Air Source practically singing in response through my veins.And that said nothing of the view. High up as we were, we were neighbors to the clouds, the soft blue of the sk...
48. Juriss - Tricks
Chapter 48TricksThe shallow depression of earth was hot and damp beneath the salvaged tent cloth, made only moreso by the thin layer of dirt and leaves Juriss had spread over it before shimmying underneath. She lay there sweating in her summoned armor, hands slick on the handle of her great blade, thoughts turning slowly and breath undisturbed. The hunter who did not know how to wait was the hunter who lost her prey, and Juriss was not one accustomed to losing.She’d prepared the ambush ground ...
